Posted
by
timothyon Monday May 21, 2012 @04:13AM
from the not-about-the-slash-fiction dept.

dsinc writes "Forbes' Alex Knapp writes about the Tesla idolatry and confusing his genius for godhood: 'Tesla wasn't an ignored god-hero. Thomas Edison wasn't the devil. They were both brilliant, strong-willed men who helped build our modern world. They both did great things and awful things. They were both brilliantly right about some things and just as brilliantly wrong about others. They had foibles, quirks, passions, misunderstandings and moments of wonder.'"

Are you kidding? How many times did Spock die? Hell, even McCoy died in one episode. Who loses more patients, McCoy or Crusher? McCoy probably lost more and NG was on the air more than twice as long as OS. Somebody (usually more than one somebody) died every damned week under Kirk.

And hey, those red shirts' mothers probably disagree with you. A good captain keeps ALL of his crew alive, not just the senior officers.

No, because Kirk and Picard are both military starship captains; they do the same job and their job performance can be compared. Comparing Ritchie and Tesla to Steven Jobs and Edison would be more like comparing Cochrane to Quark: one or both may or may not be brilliant, but one is a scientist and the other a businessman, so their abilities aren't really comparable.

Presuming that technology in the future may figure out how to travel through time, the Time Capsules that preserve detailed drawing for alternating current devices created by Steve Jobs might have them preserved for 10k+ years with instructions to be sent back in time 20k years and buried in Serbia at a place Tesla could find them. Yeah, I could see that working out.

Of course you knew that John Titor was a close personal friend of Steve Jobs as well.

And as far as Socialism > Captialism? In a dualistic World where you're only allowed to have one or the other I'd have to reverse that sign. OTOH, some of the Scandincian countries have interesting blends of the two systems and the thing that REALLY intrigues me is that they are ALWAYS on the top of the list when it comes to happiness and freedom.

I'll take being happy over rich anyday.

It's not your fault. We here in the US are pounded by propaganda like any other peoples living under an exploitive power elite.

It's a lot easier to be socialist when your defense and medical R&D are covered by other countries.

I wish the US would see this and stop doing so for the rest of the world. It's really annoying as a US citizen to be spending 4 times (as a percentage of GDP) on our military as Germany (I think we can trust them now). Yet we pretty much mandate it to be so.

Additionally we pay more for the same medicine because our government refuses to take a stand on this issue, while other governments do. I'd like to see a law that no medicine or medical devices can be sold in the US for over the average price in the rest of the G8.

The US has troops in dozens of countries around the world in various capacities outside of current war. We have the leftover cold war troops in Europe, the troops holding the line against North Korea's insane leaders, and smaller advisory or advance contingents on the rest of the continents except Antarctica. It is understood that we are the real defense for many other countries should the SHTF, so those countries don't have to spend so much on their own defense.

And this is precisely why we need to eliminate some of those 700+ (!!!) military bases around the world. We have enough problems of our own; we don't need to be subsidizing every other country in existence.

Neither Sweden nor Finland are member states of the NATO, and both were frontier states in the Cold War. No one else paid for their defense.

So this argument is moot.

A fact that ignores more complicated equations of geopolitical power struggles. Finland and Sweden were allowed to remain neutral because it suited the powers to allow that. For that same reason Switzerland remained neutral in WWII: it would have been too inconvenient to attack when it could be counted on to remain faithfully neutral. Both countries had just enough defense to make them undesirable as a target while the Soviets faced NATO. Don't confuse that with not needing NATO. They relied on NATO's existence as much as any member state did.

Don't confuse being a secondary target with not needing collective defense. Which is also the point made about socialist medical care: it works fine, while someone else is willing to foot the bill for it. Europe should be paying lobbyists in Washington to keep the US well away from national health care and price controls on drugs. Once the US stops paying for the drugs, good luck maintaining your cheap supply.

Signed those of us smart enough to remember socialists/communists equal everyone is poor and starving and most of the time disappear.Oh all socialists/communists are the laziest scum you'll ever meet.

Not sure if it was supposed to be serious. If it was, someone is a... proud American patriot.

Also Communism (as the stage of society's development when oppression and trade become unnecessary to support the production that supports society members' needs) is both a social and economic system. It's a separate question if such development is possible or desirable, but that's the definition given to it by Communists themselves. The definition of "Communism" as a "society in a country with Communist party in po

Ignorant and ideological, in just a few words. It goes capitalism->socialism, since the latter came *in* *response* to capitalism. Try reading Marx's Captial, with his analysis and description of "unbridled capitalism" that existed in the 1800s... and the the right wing in the US is trying to reinstate now.

Socialism and the Labor (sorry, Labour, for you Canadians, Aussies, and Brits) are why you, personally, have a) holiday, b) weekends, c) any benefits from your job whatsoever, beyond the right of your

What the article does not note is that Tesla didn't really claim to have invented alternating current, but he did claim (probably validly) to having invented the a working, practical AC induction motor (while a student in Europe), which made AC practical for industry. He also claimed to have invented a practical AC generator (at least he had a patent on it that he sold to Westinghouse). Additionally he did invent and patent a working system for radio and wireless signal transmission that was essentially copied by Marconi later. Add to that the Tesla coil and the working florescent light bulb, and you have a pretty impressive set of inventions. Compared to Edison (who I admire very much also) Tesla with just a couple of assistants revolutionized a great deal of the world. Edison's real claim to fame, on the other hand, was in inventing the modern invention research team system. His actual inventions were relatively few, but with teams of some dozens of inventors he spewed out patents that made him much richer and successful than Tesla (though not as rich as he wanted - he was essentially defeated in business by J.P. Morgan). Tesla unfortunately subsided into partial insanity after his attempt at power transmission in the teens, and almost every invention after that was essentially in his head.

I think the point there isn't business acumen or personal built empire.

but that what edison did.. most of the things edison did someone else would have done anyways relatively close to the time edison did it, while teslas achievements might have taken considerably more time to come up for someone else.

Edison himself wasn't a great inventor. He was a great businessman and head-of-R&D. Pioneer of inventing as a business - not as just a couple of lone experts, but a whole department of underlings systematically tackling potentially profitable issues with pooled resources. He dabbled, yes, but most of the actual inventing was done by his employees.

Actually most of Edison's ideas WERE his own. He didn't do much of the actual work of constructing prototypes or models, his hired "technicians" did this work. Edison did supervise the most interesting projects but his employees were simply given some guidelines and did the work themselves in most cases. Comparing him with Bill Gates would be correct, Mr. Gates was very involved with most of Microsoft's technical direction and he contributed to much of the technology they developed, at least in the early days.

On very interesting fact is that Edison almost invented electronics. He was working on improving the telephone (he did invent the carbon button microphone) at the same time that he was working on improvements to the electric lamp. One problem that plagued the early production carbon filament lamps was a gradual darkening of the inside of the bulb (due to evaportation of the carbon filament). Edison noted that one side of the bulb (the side connected to the positive end of the filament) darkened more than the negative side AND that a shadow appeared behind the positive end where no carbon was deposited. This was partly do to the bulb not having a perfect vacuum. Edison added a free wire into the bulb to which he connected a sensitive ammeter. When the meter was connected between this free wire and the positive end of the filament a current flowed. When it was connected to the negative end of the filament there was no current. This was the "Edison Effect", or thermionic emission, the principle upon which the vacuum tube depends on. If Edison was aware of atomic theories of electricity (IE: that electricity is the flow of negative atomic particles) is unknown. If he had been just a bit more curious he might have inserted a THIRD element into the bulb between the filament and his first electrode and experimented with the effects of both positive and negative charges on it. If he had he would have been able to notice that there was a ratio between the current change on the outer element and the voltage change on the inner, IE: amplification that could have been used as a repeater element for telephone circuits. Edison was just a small step away from inventing the Triode Vacuum tube about 30 years early! He was working on two projects that could have been connected to do this. However it didn't happen. I wonder how the world might have changed if Edison had made this leap of discovery.

This is ignorant. Yes he bought QDOS, and yes he had people working for him to modify it. This doesn't take away the fact that he was heavily involved in building the BASIC that was loaded into PROM on my PC-1! For the first several years of the company Bill coded. He also was very astute at guiding the financial and business aspects of his company, and being at the right place at the right time multiple times. Don't forget that he pointed IBM at Digital Research FIRST, before he went and purchased QDOS. At the time - Microsoft was a language company. They specialized in creating language compilers. That is how IBM had Pascal, etc. available for the PC the first day it was introduced!GAWD - you're making me defend Bill Gates - STOP THAT! (Now I've got to go and compile a linux kernel or something to make up for this!)

“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.
I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.”
Nikola Tesla

True but he was a different kind of patent "troll". For example with the light bulb once Swan had patented his design in the UK Edison submitted a almost direct copy for patenting in the US and then tried to sue Swan for patent infringement in the UK! The two eventually settled out of court with Swan running the UK side of things and Edison in the US. So by today's standards he was not a troll but he was certainly some sort of unpleasant creature living under the patent bridge - a patent orc perhaps since he liked to raid others patents and got away with it due to his wealth?

Look, Edison was an impressive inventor. Tesla was great at electricity. There's a lot of Edison hate going around lately. But he was a very good inventor, things that are completely unrelated to Tesla or AC/DC.

Bullshit. Philipp Reis also invented a telephone and gave the first public demonstraton in 1854 - more than two decades before Alexander Graham Bell. Maybe we all should read Mark Twain's words at the start of TFA again?

It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.Mark Twain

And whoever uses "X invented Y" again, shall be forever banned from ever partaking in a discussion about inventions again.

The phonograph was perhaps the most original of Edison's inventions. His inspiriation for this was his previous invention of a recording telegraph that used depresions in a rotating disk to record the dots and dashs of telegraph transmissions for later playback. The playback was electrical with the depressions in the disk causing a feeler riding on them to open and close an electrical circuit, but Edison (despite his deafness) was able to hear the crud sounds the feeler made while riding on the disk. Strangely enough, while he based the phonograph on this observation, the first phonograph used a cylinder instead of a disk to record sound.

Many have commented on how Edison 'stole' the idea of the electric lamp from others. What Edison did was to take their primative ideas and make two simple but essencial changes to the design, which made the difference between success and failure. Until Edison all previous attempts at an electric lamp used a heavy low resistance element heated to incandecance by a low voltage electrical current. The element was operated in air either in the open, or protected by a glass cover. Sometimes a thermal regulator was used to allow the element to operate close to its melting point to produce as much light as possible. Edison's lamp used a thin high resistance element operating at high voltage. Since such a thin element would burn up quickly Edison sealed it inside a blown glass bulb in a high vacuum. Edison was lucky in that a brand new type of vacuum pump that used the flow of mecury to trap air had just been invented. He bought the first production model available for his experiments. He hired professional glass blowers to produce the sealed bulbs for his lamps. He experimented with various metals to find one that had the same rate of thermal expansion and contraction as glass for use as the lead in wires for the lamp (Edison used platinum). He spend years expermenting to perfect what seems today like such a simple idea. It wasn't so simple at the time. Any complaints about Edison stealing the idea of the electric lamp from someone else is simply sour grapes.

But it was legitimately a problem back in the day. The reason was twofold:

1) There's no good way to generate DC using a mechanical system. So while something like a solar cell will generate you DC, a mechanical generator won't, at least not without some fiddling and then not as efficiently as AC. These days, not a big deal, we have good devices to convert from one to the other quite efficiently. However when the current wars were happening, DC generation wasn't as good as AC generation. You see it to this day: Cars use alternators (as in alternating current) to generate power, despite being DC devices. The alternator then has a rectifier bridge to turn it in to (pulsed) DC power, which the battery helps clean up.

2) There was no good way to convert DC voltage. AC is exceedingly easy to convert with simple technology: A transformer. You can step it up or down with some wraps of wire, and it is fairly efficient to boot. No such luck with DC. There just isn't a good way to step it up with the technology they had back then. As such you needed generators close to the home. You couldn't run massive voltages, far too dangerous (and as a practical matter difficult to generate directly) and you couldn't go for long runs because of impedance loss. These days thyristors can do the trick nicely but they are 1950s tech, and the ones that can do HVDC are more recent.

Were we to rebuild the grid these days, DC might well make sense (though it does have some other issues that need to be considered). However during the current wars, Tesla really did have it right. The technology was there to make AC work well, not DC.

Edison really was fighting for DC because of his invested infrastructure, not because it was a superior technology at the time.

>1) There's no good way to generate DC using a mechanical system. So while something like a solar cell will generate you DC, a mechanical generator won't, at least not without some fiddling and then not as efficiently as AC. These days, not a big deal, we have good devices to convert from one to the other quite efficiently. However when the current wars were happening, DC generation wasn't as good as AC generation. You see it to this day: Cars use alternators (as in alternating current) to generate power, despite being DC devices. The alternator then has a rectifier bridge to turn it in to (pulsed) DC power, which the battery helps clean up.

There is actually an interesting twist to this however which comes into play with very long power lines. The Cahora Bassa hydro-electric dam powers much of South Africa's Gauteng industrial region despite being in another country. Gauteng runs on AC, Cahora Bassa generates AC - but the line between them is DC. It gets rectified at the dam site and then reconverted to AC when it gets to the local grid.Obviously that equipment cost a pretty penny - but DC was still cheaper. The reason is that DC only requires as single cable - which can be supported by quite a thin little pole (the ground itself can be the return line).So if the line is long enough - running the power over DC can be more economical, you just need enough distance for the cable savings to start to get bigger than the converter costs.

Gauteng runs on AC, Cahora Bassa generates AC - but the line between them is DC. It gets rectified at the dam site and then reconverted to AC when it gets to the local grid.

There's another reason for doing that: you can't just stick two AC lines from non-synchronized generators together and expect it to work. They will actually work against each other, and you get a huge mess. This is a problem when combining two power sources from different countries. What's usually done in this case is to do an internal AC/DC/AC conversion to synchronize them.

There's another reason for doing that: you can't just stick two AC lines from non-synchronized generators together and expect it to work. They will actually work against each other, and you get a huge mess. This is a problem when combining two power sources from different countries.

It doesn't have to be different countries. After the Fukushima disaster, the power problems in Japan were compounded because of purchases made more than a hundred years ago. In 1895, the first electrical generators were installed in Tokyo, purchased from AEG in Germany; a year later, Osaka installed generators purchased from General Electric. AEG's generators produced 50-Hz power, while GE's generators produced 60-Hz power. This dichotomy exists to this day, so that western Japan runs on 60-Hz power, while eastern Japan runs on 50-Hz power. There are four back-to-back HVDC convertors at the border between the two grids to convert between the two frequencies, but it didn't have anywhere near the capacity to shift more than a fraction of the load to the western grid after 11 nuclear generators (including the three at Fukushima) were shut down in response to the quake, taking 9.7GW off the eastern grid.

And AC was originally practical exactly BECAUSE Tessla managed to invent three-phase... single-phase generators would probably need to be custom designed as I'm not aware of anybody building them en-masse for the non-existent market they may fill...

Three-phase generators/motors are fundamental to what made the modern electrical world possible in the first place. Technically a single-phase motor cannot even start without an outside push...

Actually, there is. A conductive disk in a magnetic field and spun such that its axis of revolution is parallel to the field will generate a measurable DC voltage between the center of the disk and its edge. Faraday had discovered this back in his day, and the underlying principle behind its operation baffled many people for many years (some would say that questions remain about it even today). It's an millivoltsextremely efficient gener

It's the same kind of media attempt to put forth a "balanced" view, even when there's a clear bias in reality. It happens all the time in politics. Just because they want to claim that Tesla not marrying is the same as Edison strangling puppies for sexual pleasure, doesn't mean those two options are the same. Some times, there isn't any reason to search for a middle ground, if one side is simply wrong.

Yes, and Nikola Tesla was simply wrong in promoting alternating current for about any use. If you look at modern electrical or electronic gear, they all have circuitry to convert alternating current to direct current before powering anything. Thomas Alva Edison was right.But where Nikola Tesla was right was that for transmitting current, alternating current beats direct current downhand. And that's why about any electrical system in the world transmits alternating current.

AC was much better for transmitting back then because transmitting high voltage is more efficient (less current means less copper and less resistive waste) and they had an efficient way of converting high voltage AC to low voltage AC (transformers). Efficient high voltage DC-DC voltage conversion was not something that was possible back in the day.

DC is actually more efficient for long distance high voltage transmission -- they just didn't have the technology to convert DC voltage. Now days HVDC transmission for new long distance lines is much more viable.

AC was much better for transmitting back then because transmitting high voltage is more efficient (less current means less copper and less resistive waste) and they had an efficient way of converting high voltage AC to low voltage AC (transformers). Efficient high voltage DC-DC voltage conversion was not something that was possible back in the day.

DC is actually more efficient for long distance high voltage transmission -- they just didn't have the technology to convert DC voltage. Now days HVDC transmission for new long distance lines is much more viable.

I've seen a few ACs on this site that I would suggest converting to high voltage...!

For modern high-voltage transmission, capacitive losses matter even at 50/60Hz. HV transmission is best done as DC. The thing Tesla was right about was that with technology available back then, AC distribution was the only feasible one. It has only been in the last few decades that we have the semiconductor technology that would allow completely solid state, DC-to-DC power conversion all the way to the consumer. That would be, ultimately, the way to go. DC-to-DC converters can be quite compact compared to 50/60Hz transformers, especially when running at high frequencies. I've seen resonant converters taking in 10kV 3 phase and outputting 1.5kV DC at about 50kVA. It had PFC as well. Two people could very easily lift one up, it was probably less than 200lbs, just bulky, and the magnetics (cores) could fit in a breadbox. Try lifting up a 50kVA oil immersed transformer with same ratings -- it's half a ton, give or take.

Alas, circuit breakers for DC are significantly more complex and expensive than ones for AC, since you have an arc that needs to be quenched. They need to have a chamber that utilizes spatial gradients in pressure or temperature (due to asymmetry of the plasma chamber) to move some air around to blow the arc out. AC arcs are usually self-extinguishing, except at extreme short-circuit currents and voltages (high voltage substations and the like).

For modern high-voltage transmission, capacitive losses matter even at 50/60Hz.....

That's an overly broad statement. Capacitive reactive losses really matter a lot on submarine or buried cable. Not much of a factor in overhead HV transmission. Think of it like the classic parallel plate capacitor - since that's what we have, just our "plates" are curved away from each other (which reduces capacitance, but let us consider them as flat here). The area (over the length of the lines) is large, yes. But what kills that off so to speak, is a product of two things: a poor dielectric medium (air) and a large distance (many meters) between the "plates".

For "plates" 3cm wide with a length of 1km and a separation of 10m: about 27pF. In other words: 27pf/km.

For that 1km model above the impedance at 60 Hz is 100Mohm. For a 220KV line that is a loss of about 480W/km. Such a line would be conveying power in the few hundreds megawatt range. Not much of a reactive loss there. Different on sub/buried: k is much larger, and S is much smaller (mm - cm distances).

Edison's position is generally mis-characterized. For long distance transmission, Edison said of course AC power at high voltage would be best. He argued that DC was best for distribution (i.e. supplying several city blocks)

Edison was basically correct except that expensive motor-generator sets would have been needed to convert AC to DC.

Also, to put it in context, Edison's vision of a central generating station was one that supplied a dozen city blocks. His vision never extended to huge remote power plant

Yes, and Nikola Tesla was simply wrong in promoting alternating current for about any use. If you look at modern electrical or electronic gear, they all have circuitry to convert alternating current to direct current before powering anything.

EXCEPT for the AC electric motor and the florescent light bulb -- two of the most common uses of power even today (and certainly before about 1960). In 1960 the refrigerator, the record player, the kitchen mixer and also various household pumps were powered by what was essentially a slightly improved version of Tesla's motor. The incandescent lights were also being run off his power too. Only really the radio needed a coil to convert to DC.

That's the point, you never would have. It essentially could not have worked out any other way. Because of which technologies follow which other technologies, HVDC simply was not practical until now. And we wouldn't be here with all these DC devices if we hadn't been through the stage of using AC.

Yes, and Nikola Tesla was simply wrong in promoting alternating current for about any use. If you look at modern electrical or electronic gear, they all have circuitry to convert alternating current to direct current before powering anything.

Except for just about all uses of power till home electronic equipment was invented in the 80's. In 1960 just about everything in the home was powered directly by AC (as in incandescent and florescent lights) or by an AC motor very similar to the one invented by Tesla. Only the radio needed a transformer to use AC power. Even today probably 90% of your actual power usage is of direct AC power (air conditioning and lights). So I would say that it is wrong to say Tesla was wrong.

AC is a lot safer around the home, at least at mains voltages (DC is ok once you get below about 40V). If you touch anything with live mains on it then it will tend to throw you off. If it were DC it could lock your muscles and you'd fry.

After having the pleasure of exploring the wonders of 90VAC 20Hz (POTS line ringing), 120VAC 60Hz (residential), 240VAC 60Hz (miswired residential appliance), to about 30,000VDC 600Hz (faulty automotive sparkplug wire). I will say I agree with you.

I learned from those mistakes, and am now very very careful. Knowing the feeling is enough to never want to feel it again.

Modern electronics require a range of low-voltage DC to power the solid state components. High-voltage mains electricity still needs to be converted to the voltages required by the individual components, and this is hardly any easier than with AC.

I live in Belgrade, Serbia, and Tesla is revered as god here. For a person who only spent a night in Belgrade (he was born in what is now Croatia but was of Serbian ethnicity), it's a bit strange he got major boulevard and airport named after him. He is also on our money and has a number of monuments.

We also have a Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade, which I recommend everybody visit. It has working examples of some of his inventions, so you can see what the first radio controlled device [pbs.org] looked like.

I don't mind it though, he was a brilliant mind. Of course, sometimes he was out of touch with reality and had no sense of business, but geniuses often are like that...

If you can find this series subtitled and want to learn more about the life of Tesla, I strongly recommend watching this [imdb.com].

He had a huge staff who did the vast bulk of his R&D and a significant % (possibly the majoroty) of his achievements were actually made by his staff with Edison just facilitating their efforts and then claiming the kudos.

A discussion of the development of electricity without mentioning Charles Proteus Steinmetz [edisontechcenter.org] is incomplete. You are pandering to the people with the big PR departments and an army of lawyers instead of the ones who really got things done.

Steinmetz understood how to build three-phase motors (the standard for big motors today) better than anyone in the early days.

I think there are a number of people that you could include in any list of people important to the development of electricity and electrical technologies. Off the top of my head, I can think of several others:

Benjamin Franklin

Alessandro Volta

Georg Ohm

Michael Faraday

Joseph Henry

Charles Wheatstone

Charles-Augustin de Coulomb

Philo Farnsworth

Guglielmo Marconi

That is just barely scratching the surface. I didn't know much about Steinmetz myself, but after reading the link you provided he certainly should be incl

From your English I'm guessing you're Russian. This is off topic, but just to let you know, the Smithsonian exhibit for Mercury Friendship 7 is pretty honest about the fact that Gagarin came first. Here's a picture of the placard in the Smithsonian:

When I was a kid 30 years ago, Edison was still the undisputed old god of engineering. It only was later, that he became villified as the suppressor of Tesla and AC. I think, it has todo with Edison's viewpoint towards intellectual property. He and his colleagues at Menlo Park invented mainly and did not produce anything, so he relied on patent fees. He procescuted anyone who produced stuff that violtated one of his many patents including early movie technology. This forced movie people from the east coast to the west. The rest is history.
Tesla was clearly the far better, more visionary scientist. Edison remains the more important inventor and engineer (lightbulb, phonograph, movie technology).

I see it as a sign of the times. 30 years ago, in the depths of the Cold War, of course the US would acknowledge one of their own, a born and bred American, over a competitor from a Soviet bloc country.

I have to start by saying that I am extremely biased. Even though it is only a few hours away, my wife won't let me visit the Edison museum in Fort Myers for fear I would burn it down.

However Edison was a truly dispicable man. You can say what you want about Gates, Jobs, Elison, Zuckerburg and others but they are businessmen and often nasty businessmen.

Edison spent years trying to discredit A/C including killing animals as large as an elephant.*

One of his inventions was the electric chair which by it's very design is a device to kill.**

The nascent movie business actually pulled up stakes and moved 3000 miles to a little CA town called Hollywood because Edison's thugs would destroy any film or equipment being used for movie making unless he got a cut.***

I could go on but I think I'm getting a tad emotionally attached to this post. I think all of us are. Have you ever seen so many four and fives?

The wireless energy one would be a good example. Tesla was really big on the idea and did a lot of work on it but the reason it never happened wasn't because of some mean conspiracy against him, unless you count the laws of physics. It is because of the inverse-square law. Electromagnetic waves drop in power with the square of distance from the transmitter. Net effect is that to cover any distance you need a bigass transmitter and when you are talking powering something, it is just not feasible.

Tesla tried to solve the problem but couldn't, because it is just how EM propagation works. It would take some other method for wirelessly transmitting power to make it feasible, which nobody, including Tesla, has come up with.

The guy was an unmitigated genius, and also a complete nut, but he wasn't some god of all invention who created everything good.

Also there's a difference between contributing to things, and inventing them. Tesla contributed to the theories behind radar, but he didn't make it happen. If you want to go on the "who started it" thing you'd probably end up back with James Clerk Maxwell, given that it was his equations that formed the foundation for classical electrodynamics and thus the most basic theoretical foundation. Of course, there was a hell of a lot from that to functioning radar.

My bet is that comic spurred this article. The writer was annoyed by this deification of Tesla.

Not sure if he invented the science behind it, but he was certainly the engineer that made it work properly. Also invented stereo sound recording and playback decades before it was thought of commercially. His (expired) patents ensured that one company couldn't stitch up the entire market.

IANA EE, but IIRC that's true only for radiated fields. If you can consider the Earth itself as a resonant conductor, then the rules are somewhat differently applied. In present-day applications, another example is any conductor or waveguide. I imagine that he was looking at the entire Earth+atmosphere in those terms. And there is some evidence that some of his work in that area was successful at least in part.

The wireless energy one would be a good example. Tesla was really big on the idea and did a lot of work on it but the reason it never happened wasn't because of some mean conspiracy against him, unless you count the laws of physics

First, we have directed wireless energy over short ranges today, and it's based on Tesla's earlier work, so to suggest that it didn't happen because of the laws of physics is an unfounded statement on a number of levels. Do you recite a poem and wind up with a schematic in your head that will change the world?

Electromagnetic waves drop in power with the square of distance from the transmitter

Assuming that they radiate equally in all directions.

My bet is that comic spurred this article. The writer was annoyed by this deification of Tesla.

And yet, he ended up with an article which is wrong where it's not besides the point. Edison hardly invented ANYTHING; he was a bankroller more than

While true, it's also misleading. The inverse square law isn't magic, it's follows naturally on from basic geometry. If you take a 2D beam with any angle of spread, then at distance 2n from the source, it will be twice as wide as at distance n. If the beam is in three dimensions, then the spread will be twice as wide in each dimension, so it will be covering four times the area. This applies just as much to flashlights as to lasers, but it's not nearly as important in the latter case as the former because going from a radius of, say, 1mm at one km to 2mm at 2km doesn't really make much difference to the brightness, while going from 10cm at 1m to 20cm at 2m does.

With things like phased array antenna, it's possible to get the beam spread quite low, with lasers you can get it very low. The problem is not the inverse square law, it's that at the kind of power and directionality you want for this kind of thing you end up with something that has no problem propagating the power efficiently to the destination and will happily burn a hole through anything that tries to prevent it from doing so.

I'm not sure his over the air power transmittion would eliminate TV or radio. It was supposed to be thorugh capacitance vibrations. Transmitting information via an electromagnetically vibrating atmosphere might hit the same hurdles as ethernet over power lines. Off the top of my head I don't see any reason other than business that his towers of power wouldn't work along side of radio communication. But then again, I almost failed electromagnetics.